Tag: surveillance FBI

+ Teneo, the global consulting firm with strong ties to Hillary Clinton, denied that it wielded undue influence on the State Department, when Clinton was the country’s top diplomat, and it declined to answer questions posed by a Senate panel examining the issue, reports Reuters. One of the unanswered questions was about a three-hour meeting in 2012 at the firm’s office with Cheryl Mills when she was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Clinton.

+ The family of Louisiana State University running back Leonard Fournette may have committed a NCAA violation by starting an online business to capitalize on his potential star power – but they shut it down just before his freshman season.

+ Only by having a form accidentally left in his mailbox did longtime activist Leslie James Pickering find out that he was being investigated by the FBI, ATF and other government agencies, which were tracking nearly his every move. After a lengthy public records battle, the former unofficial spokesperson of the Earth Liberation Front who now owns a bookstore, he realized that his FBI file is more than 30,000 pages long and dates back to the early 1990s, he told an audience in Worcester, Mass:

“When you find out you’re under surveillance … it can be really intimidating,” he said before the talk. “A lot of people run and hide and call it quits because of this. We want to set a different example and show people you can turn lemons into lemonade, so to speak, and continue to fight.”

+ Journalists in Canada are calling for changes to the country’s freedom of information laws on the federal and provincial level. Though such laws are being used more frequently to uncover important information – including the 2014 disclosure of a TransCanada gas pipeline rupture in northern Alberta – there’s also been a troubling increase in “exceptions and refusals.”

+ Take a look at the redesigned website for the Ground Truth Project, which is dedicated to “training a new generation of international correspondents and documentary filmmakers to go out in the world to produce social justice journalism that enlightens and informs.”